Saturday, July 28, 2012

It is long known that in cities there may be a significant climatic effect due to urbanization - thus in cities we have the interesting and challenging task of determining at least three significant drivers for change, if not more, namely the effect of the local modification of the environment as well as the local manifestation of global change due to greenhouse gases (plus, possibly other global factors). Unfortunately, systematic studies about the determination and separation of these effects - in principle a detection and attribution task - have not been done often. At least, I am not aware of such efforts; indeed even studies only on the size and distribution of the urban heat island effect (UHI) are not done often; in Hamburg, a first study was only published in the last few years - before that one could hear that in a maritime climatic environment as Hamburg, the effect would be negligible. It is not.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Fundamental ideologies, beliefs, values, artifacts (technology / tool / literature and poems)), values, assumptions are the things that make up culture. (I am sure I have missed a few but you get the idea.). In our cultural analysis of climate change many of these have been catalogued in one way or another, in one region or another, at one time or another, with one group of people or another. We have learned ‘how people feel about nature’ or ‘how people feel about climate change’ and I have also been made aware of some nice poems. Now, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a nice luxury but climate change is, we are told, about real danger in need of real pragmatic action, although many ideals are often floated.

Let’s assume for this exercise that climate change is indeed one of the greatest and most dangerous issues facing life (in all of its aspects, as we know it) on Earth. Then what is the pragmatic contribution of cultural studies? (I admit there is probably a great deal I do not know about cultural studies and would therefore be grateful for any examples.)

The full manuscript is available from academia.edu, the abstract reads:To do climate science sustainably, a number of constraints in practicing research and communicating science need to be implemented. Among them are the admission of uncertainty and the possibility for future revision, the recognition that scientific knowledge is challenged and influenced by cultural constructions, and the usage of accurate language, which is not conflicting with every-day language. That scientific knowledge does not directly lead to political conclusions must also be recognized. A few elements needed for a successful science-public dialogue are listed and discussed.

We are glad to announce a special issue of "Nature and Culture" on "post-normal climate science", edited by Werner Krauss, Mike S. Schäfer and Hans von Storch. It is follow-up to our last year's workshop on "post-normal science: the case of climate research", which was discussed for example here and now gets a wonderful update by Jerry Ravetz, who puts the workshop into the context of the history of post-normal science. During this summer, we will present his and all the other articles here on klimazwiebel for discussion.

Judith Curry already presented Silke Beck's article from this special issue, 'Between tribalism and trust: The IPCC under the "public microscope",' here on Climate etc. This is an excellent piece of social science, which aims to reconstruct a debate in order to show how it came into being and to make it understandable. This is not about truth or not truth, right or wrong: this is about the social dynamics of a public and highly contested debate.

Read here the abstract (main parts of the text and a link to the manuscript you find on the Judith Curry link)

Sometimes, scenarios of possible future climate change are examined if they would represent a "statistically significant" change from present conditions. Usage of this terminology is misleading, and valid only in a very restricted sense - because of the sampling assumptions needed for employing the machinery of statistical hypothesis testing.
This issue is discussed in the paper "Testing ensembles of climate change scenarios for"statistical significance"by Hans von Storch and Francis W. Zwiers, which has been accepted for publication by "Climatic Change".

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A
recurrent issue in statistical climatology is how to deal with
long-term trends when one is trying to estimate correlations between
two time series. A reader sent us the following question, posed to
him by a friend of his, related to our test of the method applied by
Mann et al to produce the hockey-stick curve in 1998

Sustainable use of KLIMAZWIEBEL

The participants of KLIMAZWIEBEL are made of a diverse group of people interested in the climate issue; among them people, who consider the man-made climate change explanation as true, and others, who consider this explanation false. We have scientists and lay people; natural scientists and social scientists. People with different cultural and professional backgrounds. This is a unique resource for a relevant and inspiring discussion. This resource needs sustainable management by everybody. Therefore we ask to pay attention to these rules:

1. We do not want to see insults, ad hominem comments, lengthy tirades, ongoing repetitions, forms of disrespect to opponents. Also lengthy presentation of amateur-theories are not welcomed. When violating these rules, postings will be deleted.2. Please limit your contributions to the issues of the different threads.3. Please give your name or use an alias - comments from "anonymous" should be avoided.4. When you feel yourself provoked, please restrain from ranting; instead try to delay your response for a couple of hours, when your anger has evaporated somewhat.5. If you wan to submit a posting (begin a new thread), send it to either Eduardo Zorita or Hans von Storch - we publish it within short time. But please, only articles related to climate science and climate policy.6. Use whatever language you want. But maybe not a language which is rarely understood in Hamburg.